HGO’s Arresting American premiere: Weinberg’s The Passenger

A beautiful thing is not always easy to watch. Houston Grand Opera opens the new year with the American premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger –a story that moves from a pristine ocean liner to an austere scene in Auschwitz. The program notes describe it, aptly, as “draining” and “unrelenting.” Even so, I noticed more people stayed to watch the final act of The Passenger than had lasted in the more digestable Die Fledermaus earlier this season. There’s a lot of talent and passion behind HGO’s production: for such a traumatic narrative, it proved aesthetically arresting.

A tattered black curtain opens on a bright, white ocean liner where Liese, a former SS officer, catches a glimpse of another passenger. Her husband Walter, a German dignitary, confronts his panicked wife, and she confesses her past and her fear that this passenger might have been her prisoner from Auschwitz. The scene moves back in time to Auschwitz where a doomed love story between two prisoners, Marta and Tadeusz, ends with a wrenching aria about forgiveness, forgetting, and everlasting memories of suffering.

The singing is superb. As Liese, Michelle Breedt is an example of what a mezzo-soprano should sound like: warm in her lower register and rich at the top of her range without ever sounding strained. Soprano Melody Moore, singing the part of Marta, has depth behind her voice that was necessary to portray this character. Her final aria was exquisitely controlled, yet emotionally unbarred. Making his HGO debut in the role of Tadeusz, baritone Morgan Smith made me wish Weinberg had written more for Tadeusz. While some baritones’ timbre can easily become muddled, Smith’s voice rang out consistently with strapping purity.

The visual is divine. Hats off to the creative team behind this production. The stage is divided between the stark silver chrome of the ocean liner above and the dark dismal reality of a concentration camp below, making the quick shifts in time smooth. Lighting Designer Fabrice Kebour deserves special accolades. Rows of spotlights moved like a grid accented by fog that set, rather incredibly, the emotional stage behind the visual. It was class to the core: there was nothing that looked like kitsch, which is more than I can say for the music.

Weinberg’s score is not great. The music that situates the ocean-liner aurally is best described as something that is supposed to resemble jazz. When time shifts back to Auschwitz, the score looks to folk music and Yiddish motifs that feel over-determined. It seemed a bit clever that the strings moved in parallels when the prisoners sang their personal stories, but the score felt overworked in its representation of the narrative, and missed, somehow, setting the characters apart musically in their arias.

In no way did this reflect poorly on the orchestra, though. Conductor Patrick Summers was more animated and enthusiastic than I’ve seen this season. The strings melted the air, especially in the reduced chamber moments. Walking bass and saxophone, despite the lackluster score, managed to insert a disconcerting peppiness to contrast with the horrifying reality of Auschwitz.

Finished in 1968, it’s taken a while for The Passenger to see the stage. Violent scenes, like when a female prisoner is brutally beaten by a group of male SS officers, do not make for light entertainment. While the score and libretto are flawed, the opera stands as an important cultural piece and opens up a narrative that is hard to watch, let alone discuss in an artistic medium. On leaving, I admit I felt frustrated by Weinberg’s score until I noticed a woman still staring at the stage with tears running down her cheeks. Despite the opera’s structural flaws, HGO’s skillful execution of The Passenger calls for pause.

About Me

Sydney Boyd is a critic and scholar in Houston, TX. She holds degrees in both English and music and currently works as a Spatial Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She studies how music shapes narrative temporalities in 20th-century literature and, occasionally, returns to her origins as a violinist.